They were screaming. They were alive.
Something shook free from a dome in one tower. It punched and thrust its way out, piercing a shifting membrane, and slurped its way into the water. The submarine. It rocketed blindly up at Javier. A pore in its surface irised open. He kicked furiously. Tried to swim away. All the instincts washed away by the waves returned to him now, and he struggled in the water as though he were really drowning. But it was too late. He was sucked in. He was Jonah in the whale.
“What you have to know about humans is what they don’t know about themselves,” Arcadio says. “They’re machines, too. Humans are just machines. They run programs just like we do, they just run different ones.”
He is in the forest with his father. He likes the forest. He likes the many layers it has, all stacked up on each other like the things called “shipping containers” that Arcadio says, once upon a time, his clade stepped out of before leaping into the trees. Steel boxes a mile high, a secret inside each one. His clade came to the forest because it was made for the forest – for jumping and clinging. A-R-B-O-R-E-A-L. That was the English word. And like his father and grandfather before him, Javier loves it there – the way it is never silent, the way it is never lonely. He loves the speed with which the lizards skitter up the trees, and the gentle sway of crocodiles through the water. He loves the fizz of sunlight on his skin. And he loves the storms just as much when they sweep over the trees and make them whisper and moan.
But they are about to leave the forest, for good. There is more food beyond the treeline and more food is what they need for him to grow and for Arcadio to make more boys in his belly. It is high time he grew up. He is two months old, now.
It has been two months since Arcadio fled the burning camp with Javier in his belly. Two months since his father cut him out with an old multi-tool. Two months of fooling drones with their photosynthetic skin – it plays hell with their IR vision. Two months of killing botflies. Two months of opening their mouths wide to taste even the slightest hint of smoke.
Today is the first day he has seen human beings.
“What do you mean, they’re machines?”
Javier stares at the tourists from high above. They’re all so much bigger than he is. Bigger, and paler. Their hair is straight. Their words have hard edges. Nothing rhymes. They walk like they’re in pain all the time.
“They’re meat,” Arcadio says, “but that meat is just a jumble of chemical signals and electric impulses. Batteries and wires, you know? They’re just like us.”
“They’re prettier.”
Arcadio grins. “Yes. They’re prettier.”
“They don’t all look alike. They’re all different.”
“That’s right. They’re all unique.”
Unique. Javier smiles. What a wonderful idea, to make each iteration different from every other one. Combinations, not replications, each as individual as a storm. Not just mistakes, like him and Arcadio. Not just an error in automated self-repair.
“Come on. It’s time you met one.”
His father drops off the bough of the tree he is currently occupying. He falls eight feet to another bough, then three, until he stands on the lowest bough of the opposite tree. He snaps his fingers. That’s his signal for irritation. Javier has already learned to hate the sound.
“I’m not gonna wait,” his father says.
Javier jumps.
They wait for the humans to board their tour buses. As the buses pass below, they jump on. They’re light enough that the driver doesn’t notice their presence. If the bus’ sensorium says anything, they don’t hear of it. They bounce and sway on the roof for an hour. Javier’s fingers are stiff from curling across the rack when they jump free a few minutes outside of town.
From there they walk. Javier does not like walking; concentrating on measuring his steps eats more processing power than just jumping, but Arcadio says it uses less total energy, so they have to walk. Besides, el corporación is still looking for them. The motion-identifying algorithms in their drones can find them by their jumps. So no more jumping, until they’re safe.
“Do all towns look like this?” Javier asks.
The town is a cluster of houses made of bundled rods printed to look like wood, with thatch roofs that smell like recycled latex. They stand about ten feet high in the trees, above the muddy track where Javier and Arcadio are standing. Each building is connected to the other by a bridge of rope and slats. It’s all very neat and orderly. Javier has not seen so many right angles since the last time they camped in an old truck that got stuck in the mud during a long ago rainy season.
“I don’t think so,” Arcadio says. “It doesn’t look like any pictures I’ve seen. I think the humans made it special because it’s where they go on vacation.”
“Vacation?”